I’m finally home from a month-long vacation, and settling back into my normal routine. Getting unpacked, greeting my cats, realizing just how badly the red-eye flight messed up my circadian rhythm.

As always, returning from a long time away brings a lot of mixed feelings. Contentment with life as I’m used to it... happiness at seeing my favorite cat again... a bit of dread at knowing that soon I have to start setting my alarm again...

Looking out the window, though, something else struck me with unusual force. The snow is falling, the clouds have completely closed the town in... it’s beautiful, but at the same time, it makes me feel a little trapped. The horizon is invisible, and the fog has formed a wall, making the town look like a large, gilded cage.

It made me glad that I’m an author. Suddenly, the idea of an imaginary world where the sky is clear, the horizon visible, and the world ever-changing just felt so freeing. It reminded me of one of the reasons why I’m blessed to have all these mental landscapes to explore and to share with others.

I’ve got so many projects on the go – ideas that I had to write down before they could escape – that sometimes I hardly know which to prioritize next. These are a few of the escapes into fictionland that I look forward to sharing with you:

The companion book to My Fugitive, title to be revealed when I choose one

A short novel whose characters live inside the mind of an author, watching the stories of their own lives evolve and waiting to be written into being

A deconstruction of the superhero genre, written ‘in medias res’ and exploring some of the oddities of that genre that the stories within it tend to leave unaddressed